Gore Calls for Demonstrations: What If They Held a Protest and Nobody Came?

Al Gore is dreaming if he thinks that global warming will spark a sustained mass protest movement here in the USA.  From the story:

Former Vice President Gore is calling for major rallies to protest congressional inaction on climate change. In a post on his personal blog headlined “The Movement We Need,” Gore linked to and quoted from an Australian wire service report that “tens of thousands of protesters … have taken to the streets across Australia to urge the major political parties to take action on climate change.” “Across the world, when politicians fail to take action to solve the climate crisis, people are taking action,” Gore wrote. He added after excerpting the news report: “It is my hope we see activism like this here in the United States.”

Well, that’s pretty pathetic.  One reason former Australian PM Kevin Rudd lost his job and popularity was his attempt to impose a carbon tax.  Indeed, when I was Down Under recently, his successor, Julia Gillard, explicitly calibrated her election campaign to not seem radical about climate change.  (See Secondhand Smokette’s SF Chronicle blog post about a very clever Green political ad skewering Gillard’s equivocating.  Be sure to watch.  It cracked us both up when we first saw it on Aussie TV.)  So these protests Gore is excited about mean next to nothing.

Back here in the USA, I don’t doubt that lefties could put together a protest—with drummers and big puppets too!  That’s what they do, after all.  But a sustained mass movement of the kind likely to move policy, as during Vietnam, predicated upon imposing a carbon tax and other economy-killing measures?  In a bad recession?  Not. A. Chance.

Former Vice President Gore is calling for major rallies to protest congressional inaction on climate change.

In a post on his personal blog headlined “The Movement We Need,” Gore linked to and quoted from an Australian wire service report that “tens of thousands of protesters … have taken to the streets across Australia to urge the major political parties to take action on climate change.”

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“Across the world, when politicians fail to take action to solve the climate crisis, people are taking action,” Gore wrote.
He added after excerpting the news report: “It is my hope we see activism like this here in the United States.”